Players: The Crimson Dynamo?
Summary: SHIELD had a back-up plan to ensure that the Crimson Dynamo didn't go astray
Date: October 20, 2012
Log Title: A Side Event
Rating: Log Rating.
**WARNING: Parts of this narrative were passed with incomplete review. The pages were printed before Stan saw them, etc.
Barnes Academy - Headmaster's Office
"Go in now, Mr. Drakos," the agent at the reception desk said.
Mike nodded, and walked through the door into the administrator's office. He expected to find Sam Wilson there, but he didn't expect the figure he saw with him: a man in his thirties, Asian race, in a black civilian suit and tie with sunglasses - the standard uniform of the Field Agent, given that the room was not brightly lit. They were probably special display glasses, knowing SHIELD tech. Mike's facial recognition system finally broke through his distraction. That was agent James "Jimmy" Woo, one of the higher ranking SHIELD operatives, and currently listed as the Evaluations Officer for the school - the one who would decide whether Mike got to go into advanced college-levels or if he'd end up being forced to go into the cold, cruel, much less well-equipped world in the spring.
"Well, Drakos," the man said, while Mike stood at attention - not saluting, SHIELD wasn't about salutes as such - "I am informed that you offered your assistance for our upcoming raid on the Church of Humanity. I have two questions. First, how did you find out there WAS going to be a raid. Second, how do you propose to help? The note didn't make much sense."
"Sir," Mike said, glad that he couldn't sweat, "I know Connor Blake, and I know his uncle Yuri. We ate Thanksgiving dinner together, well, they ate, I did what I do. I was able to find out about Yuri Petrovich by searching public records - and I found out he was the Dynamo last year, when I cracked a Russian computer system that had been re-purposed to run bot nets. They were using a storage server and hadn't cleaned up the drives. With the execution advertised, there was a 95% probability that SHIELD would attempt to do something, and a 90% probability that it would involve allowing Yuri Petrovich to use the Crimson Dynamo armor, with most of the really good weapons removed for safety. I tracked internal communications last week and there were some conversations that confirmed the offer."
"How? Oh, right, you're that robot car mutant I heard about." Woo focused a look on Sam Wilson, who just shrugged.
"Yes sir, I am. I request permission to inhabit the Crimson Dynamo armor, to serve as a backup. These people have a lot of advanced machinery, stuff that a small cult cannot get nor afford without some serious technology or secret backers. It can go wrong in a lot of ways if they have the right hardware. I have friends there, sir. If I am in that robot, then I can do two things. I can keep Petrovich from going off-mission, before, during, and after, if necessary. And I can provide a backup in the event that he is taken down. When I inhabit a vehicle, and this armor is definitely a vehicle, I can modify it, repair it, I can even run it if the pilot is knocked out. It becomes my body, in effect." Mike would swallow, would exhale nervously, but that was part of his chassis design, and he didn't want to waste cycles simulating them with his image inducer.
"Fine. Wilson, get the young man a security key." Sam Wilson complied, a slight surprise on his face. His falcon, however, remained in the room.
The bird stared at Mike, and Mike stood, completely still. Woo stared at Mike, and Mike stood, completely still. It was excruciating. Mike wondered if it was possible for metal to sweat nervously, but decided that if it was, he would have rusted.
The agent made no comment, and was simply enigmatic. Mike considered checking to see if he had a pulse, but decided against it. Finally, Wilson came back with a small keyfob. "You bring that thing back, but don't get yourself killed. I don't want to explain to your mother."
"Yes sir," Mike said, taking the device. The agent gave him a paint-peeling stare. It was tangible even through the sunglasses.
"One thing, Drakos," he said. "You are not to discuss this foray beforehand with anyone who is not already authorized. Understood? This is not an official operation."
Mike nodded, "Yes sir. I will need at least a few hours to familiarize myself with the armor."
"Then get out of here."
Mike turned to go, leaving the headmaster to discuss the situation.
- - - -
The Crimson Dynamo was in an open crate. It had been savaged. Its heart had been opened - the exotic electrical generator built by Anton Vanko was still there, still functional, still capable of drawing power from the ether at a greater rate than should be possible, but the electro-blast weapon had been taken out, by someone who didn't know where all the fasteners were. A broken clip showed that. The navigation system, the booster jets (fuel tanks empty) were there as well. Smoke pellets were still there, but the system hadn't been tested or cleared for nearly a decade, and Mike didn't trust them.
He grabbed two flasks of fuel and put them into the passenger cavity, then touched the shoulder of the thing. "OK, here we go. Vroom…" and he vanished.
A moment later, the clip was repaired, allowing the passenger restraint system to correctly fasten, and the booster jets were fully fueled. The smoke pellets had been refreshed.
"- Odd … this thing has vacuum tubes, -" Mike said from the internal speaker. "- Oh, right, those are more stable than the transistors they could make in the USSR back then. OK, how about … of course there's no online documents, this is the 80s, comrade. How about? Ah yes. Microfiche block in the master control interface. All the technical specs in a form you could read but the reader was part of the weapon controls and those are gone… well, that's just optics, I can make a replacement. Cool. Oh, that's what it's supposed to look like? Easily fixed, Yuri may not notice that it's back to spec… OK, fine, I see what's happening here. So these tubes are the nav system. Radar is less easily tricked. Higher power capacity too, I see how the electronic system overrides worked. Interesting… -"
Six hours later, he was 'playing' an online game using his own processor to impersonate a PC, when he heard a voice at the edge of his perceptions. Logout time - sounds like Uncle Yuri is here.
scene change
New Jersey - Giants Stadium
The Dynamo hovered low, outside the visual range, while the video feed from several SHIELD camera remotes monitoring the ceremonies were fed to the display. The small, secretive SHIELD support team sent a telephoto scan over the crowd and a forked copy of Mike recorded every face, every identification that he could, for later use. The crowd was ugly - in general, and not just because of their hateful purpose. These were people who don't believe in dentistry, in modern medicine, in bathing too often perhaps. There may have been generational inbreeding too.
Mike felt an unaccountable itch in his left foot. He had completely locked out his own ability to direct the machine that was his current body, so that it wouldn't confuse things, but he could pull that lock if things became ugly. The noise of the crowd, from the hidden microphones and from the television feed that the Church was preparing, was a combination of badly mangled hymns, hate rhetoric, and banal bickering over the limited porta-potties.
Meanwhile Vanko's electrical generator design pulled more power than Mike was used to handling in 3-D land, focusing it through sliding-plate induction motors that generated thousands of times the strength of the muscles they resembled, and combined with the exoskeletal frame he suspected that this thing was disgustingly strong, perhaps enough so to tear apart a Sentinel. Maybe Uncle Yuri would show his fighting prowess.
Mike was thinking primarily about another problem. His Mom had been busy trying to find out why none of the other churches had spoken against them officially, why the directive had come and who had sent it that they were not to be confronted, no protests, no public denouncements. Then, last week, she had stopped emailing him with their 'code' — her last note had told him to sleep well, eat his vegetables, and stay warm in the winter weather. That had him concerned, but his Papa was in Europe talking with the people at Volvo about a new engine design.
A change in the feed, an ugly noise and something moving on the garish stage/altar - Mike turned his emotional process to low-priority, record and filter for later therapy, and observed the hospitality offered to guests of the Church of Humanity. There was Connor looking beaten, and Quenton with a ghastly slash on either side of his lips, badly concealed by makeup, and another pair, one of them in obvious shock. And they're being strung up.
He recognized that there was a 12% probability that they would show mercy to mutants in general, but with the degree of torture displayed, he considered that this was the new fork, the change in the timeline that led to the mutant extermination campaign. It was earlier here, before they were really prepared for the full takeover. And then he realized that they were moving, he was jetting at top speed with the boosters engaged, slamming in a football tackle into the shoulder of the Sentinel robot!
Where did those fancy martial arts moves go, Uncle Yuri? For a ouchdammit! Mike slammed into the ground, bouncing and feeling his external radio antenna snap off. He quickly materialized a replacement, before Yuri could realize that it was gone, and found himself standing back up while Yuri mocked the Church goons using his external speaker: "Well… that could have been going better. So. You are wishing to be oppressive, yes? And not being inviting us. Typical American mentality. Thinking you are doing everything better."
He found himself jetting over to the stage, with Yuri spreading his arms out in a dramatic, and probably cool-looking move. Mike was slightly stunned. This was NOT the highly effective fighter, was it? Was he TRYING to get killed?
"Get the young men out of here. NOW!" over his speakers again. OK, clearly, he WAS trying to get killed. And Mike had promised NOT to show himself. Inside, Yuri turned on the comms, setting them to a non-standard frequency. Well, certainly nonstandard for the time this armor was built — but RFID used that band now. But not for VOICE, and clearly Yuri wanted to communicate to the man with the bionic arm and the flagrant case of light-eye, because the tight-band antenna pointed at him. "For whoever is being here to be rescuing… this is being what Americans call a clusterfuck. Please to be coordinating with clearing route for escape."
Thank you Uncle Yuri, Mike thought, but then the freaking SENTINEL noticed them, and shot out those stupid restraint tentacle things, sentinel hentai, and Mike was delighted when Yuri said "Stupid American piece of garbage… Thank God for that!" and grabbed them and YANKED, ripping them the hell out of the robot. Awesome, this thing is STRONG. Maybe we can, oh hell, Yuri had kicked in the jets, they were FLYING again, this time into a classic uppercut. Well whatever. Mike subtly threw more power into the jet-thrust; these jets may be old, but f=ma works even if you're ancient.
The uppercut landed. The Sentinel was staggered, its blaster fired and took out some of its own charges and set fire to the grass and a set of bleachers. Mike felt a bit of disorientation as the Crimson Dynamo spun, twisted, flipped. Without his usual sensors it took him almost 20 milliseconds to recover at the top of the arc before Yuri flipped back, and started by firing his full drive again, this time starting from 600 yards of overshoot, and the back-vents opened to allow the overdrive to kick on. Mike calculated the mass ratio and hoped that they wouldn't miss - and they didn't. They went right through the Sentinel's head. (And in the heat of the moment Mike allowed himself not to notice that a giant robot with a freaking CAR FOR A HEAD had appeared in a blast of retro rock and was STEALING HIS THING. Not yet. Later.)
The Crimson Dynamo hit. Unfortunately this model of Sentinel is nearly as hard as the Dynamo armor. Not quite. Mike had a momentary experience of the inside of a Sentinel's head, the processors and sensors exploding out, before the ground ate his face. Strangely, it didn't hurt nearly as much as he thought it would. Being buried head-first in a crater gave him a chance to check his injuries - the radio antenna was gone again, of course. So were half the vacuum tubes in the navigation and comm system. One of the jets was cracked. The left leg stabilizer gyro was shredded. The power system was angry but turning it off didn't seem a bad thing since Yuri was basically slumped in his harness, breathing hard and trying to laugh quietly.
Something yanked on his foot, and Mike shifted his awareness to scan outside the armor. Some kind of a strange love-child of the Hulk and Conan the Barbarian yanked on him, pulling him out of the ground and bending one of the still-hot boot jets. Again, ow. But then the SHIELD guys came to his rescue in a helicopter. Shooting rubber bullets (which bounced off admirably from the crimson armor) they blared out on a loudspeaker, "PUT THE RUSSIAN SUPERTECH ARMOR DOWN AND STEP AWAY! YOU ARE IN POSSESSION OF SHIELD PROPERTY. I REPEAT. PUT. THE RUSSKIE. DOWN."
Yuri snorted and yelled, since the external speaker was ALSO offline, "Rooskaya? Feh… Hello, Dugan. Now be going back to the bottom of your cheap booze bottle."
Not really fair, Mike thought. Dugan was a sometime regular in the poker game they didn't think the kids at the school knew about. He never drank cheap booze.
The hulkazoid dropped Mike and started opening his sleeve… which considering the naked barbarian thing was just freaky looking. But before disaster could continue an electromagnet clamped onto his butt, and Mike found himself and his passenger swinging through the air, over the water.
— Drop me in the water and I will drip all over your office — Mike sent to Dugan. The man didn't QUITE dunk him but he clearly considered it.
